Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Agency

Last November, we were asked by the Kenwood Group to come up with a teaser opener for the Day 2 Keynote speech of the Adobe MAX 2008 conference.

Kenwood already had a tongue-in-cheek spy/James Bond theme in mind for the whole presentation (called "The Agency") so they wanted us to inject that into the opening. After a few brainstorming sessions, we all agreed that the phenomenal credit sequence of "The Incredibles" would be a great stylistic reference to draw upon because it matched the tone and flare of what we were trying to accomplish.

We started by creating a couple of style frames to try and capture the look and feel of the piece:

Definitely the biggest challenge of this project was the aspect ratio we had to work at. The presentation was taking place in one of the main halls of the convention center and the video was going to be projected on 3 huge HD screens at the back of the stage.

Inside the conference room before the crowds.

Needless to say we've never output anything that big before so it was both a daunting and exciting challenge. One thing the client emphasized was taking advantage of the scale and width of the screens. So as we were laying things out, we tried to plan out sequences that had dramatic horizontal movement. The whole process was like plotting out a mural on a postage stamp.

Backstage it felt like NASA...

The best part was that we got to go to the actual presentation and see our work projected HUGE. Here's a video that was taken by someone in the audience. You can see the scale of the screens. They were so big the whole image couldn't even fit in the shot.

We also created the techy screens that appear at the beginning of the movie as well as the "virtual set" of the headquarters that is behind the speakers.

"Agent" Buntell getting his orders from "The Chief"

Final design for the virtual set

For those of you interested, Adobe posted the whole keynote presentation online, shot with wider lenses and multiple cameras. Our work starts at about 1:43.